I definitely lost interest after Big. The game maybe got too easy? It’s like when you’re playing with cheat codes and suddenly you find yourself going, “Why am I even playing this game?”. Big was like that for me. I sorta just screwed around after that. There was a BM kittycore contest (I got like, 3rd place), a few regular SCNP runs, and then the class revamps. The 6 class revamps led to the winter challenge path, a rehash of class act, but with some major changes.

And in the same vein as Big, Class Act 2 was too easy. With Class Act 2, all stat gains from fights are doubled, and stats from non-combats are halved. Furthermore, monster level has tiered penalties, which add increasing difficulty to the fight. However, with the stat gain tweak, there isn’t much need to run that much +monster level. You want a little, but with +50 or so, and doing the quests efficiently, you have a stat deficit of around 500, or 5 sewer monsters of powerleveling (sewer leveling is back). It really just removes the choice of +ML.
It’s further abusable by crap like 20% GAP runaways, since levels 11 and 12 are so combat heavy, you can just use 20% gap runaways on all the non-combats in level 11, while still gaining enough stats to reach level 13 by the time you’re doing with level 12.

I would really like a challenge path that has 1) more difficult combats 2) more complex gameplay. Bugbears was really great in both of these regards, except it wasn’t very obvious what you had to do, so you also had to spade out quite a bit of stuff. Which was boring and stupid. Bees was this way too, but it wasn’t fair to poorer, newer players that didn’t have all the stuff. It’s certainly an aspect to competitive no-path play, but in bees, sometimes the newer, cheaper substitutes just didn’t cut it. Bees also wasn’t complex in an interesting way, it was in a trivial “just don’t pull things with “b” in the name, stupid” sort of way.

Oh, Crimbo also happened, and I made piles of boring meat. My strategy of sell stuff as soon as I could get it paid off. Crimbo currency on day 1 was like 7k, and by the end it was down to 400. It was really interesting because the stuff you bought with the crimbo currency wasn’t useful for anything else but generating some very specific stuff to help fight the monsters. The good stuff from crimbo came in the form of scheduled drops (every 11th monster), which were like lotto tickets, giving a random (but weighted) prize. There was a very limited, rare and non-functioning item that caused all of the other drops in the prize pool to become very affordable, because everyone wanted this thing. It was a strange economic situation. It created demand for the lotto tickets, but not for the thing you get from the ticket. If it was more like an arcade counter where you could simply pick your prize, there would hoarding of whatever was “the best” and the second choice items wouldn’t be bought. or everyone would be saving up for the rare item and no one would get anything else.

Ketchup monger, my multi, is slowly gaining levels. I’ve gotten up to 110 over the past few months in the game info dungeon. I’ve experimented with shoring, which gives roughly 50% more stats, but is 100% more boring. I can generate ~100k after food in the daily pro dungeon, and break even running turns at the shore (so meat isn’t a consideration). I can’t use the brindle stocking at the shore either.

I’ve done 10 SCBig runs, 6 of which were 2 days, 4 of which were 3 days. My highest turncount is 606 (the run that I spent getting the florist to work right). My lowest turncount is 491. Both of those occurred on 3 day runs. My fastest overall is 2/512, as a disco bandit (under the canidian “Platypus” moonsign).

On the leaderboard, the lowest turncount is 440, and the highest is 529. The median is 492. Silvers start at 464. The mean isn’t interesting because the shape of the curve isn’t Gaussian, but rather Poisson, and wont tell you were the majority of leaderboard spots are centered around.

It really breaks down to quest optimization, and possibly pulls. +stats and runaways are irreverent, so is turn gen. it’s mostly just a matter of 1)combat frequency modifiers 2) +item drops, and both of those things can be hard capped.
I guess in a broader sense, runaways and +stats can be maxed in SCNP, and the broader implications of a reduced playing space aren’t as obvious.

On a personal note, I have started meat farming again.
I feel like I’ve been doing this a lot this year,and I guess I kinda have. I made the start up a little easier by writing a bit into my startup script to eat/drink/spleen and do some basic stuff like breakfast and change. I’m still running the turns in mafia, albeit by going “adv 400 peak”. it’s an easy step, and I like charging the cheese up between login and playing turns (which isn’t easy to script).
I don’t have a goal for meat farming, like “meat farm up a Mr A” or “meat farm up a hand turkey”, it’s just, I don’t want to ascend. I don’t care if I still have 9 more outfit parts to get from the sea bosses, and I don’t care that I don’t have the fastest Big run.

The last goal that I really set for myself was to do a 2 day bugbear run. And I did. setting a goal of spending time farming for a UR isn’t a goal in the same sense, because the bugbear run required more planning than “spend time in a zone with a UR”. I don’t think I’m getting burnt out, so much as bored.
And maybe that’s fine.

It really seems like the bokken is the best, since the weapon damage is pretty big for a 1 handed weapon. The bow and staff are both kinda meh, because they are 2 handed, and the enchantments are only slightly better than what you find lying on the ground. I’d like to see the staff get upgraded to a chefstaff at some point, especially since you can get more +spell damage from the cookbooks in the guild store.

Also, it seems like there is a flat delay before the non-combats show up in the swamp. And once they show up, they show up really quickly. It was clearly not designed to be used in the speed game, although with the rewards the way they are, they probably wouldn’t have been anyway. It’s really hard to get excited about weapon damage, or damage against ghosts, when you already have combat figured out. I think it’s neat that players without a lot of perms have an additional option, even it’s going to cost them 50+ turns.

I’m not really sure what goals to pursue. I kinda don’t want to spend any more time ascending, so I guess I can just meat farm for a bit. I also have the option of hobo stuff or maybe even slimetube stuff, I guess. I like that I can run whatever familiar I want in hobopolis and still get a good meat per adventure, but I dislike having to wait for the consumables to sell in the mall.
Or maybe it’s time to farm up an ultra-rare?

I cut a turn off my previous best (from 526 to 525). the kicker is that I did the 526 under the knoll moon sign (the preferred zodiac for speed) and I did the 525 under the Platypus, which is the worst sign for speed. Another difference was the 526 was a DB with pickpocket and disco combos and the 525 was a seal clubber run without any innate speed bonuses. it was pure RNG.

The new run doesn’t have any effect on my board position. I still haven’t done a “real” run. all the runs so far have been “eh, whatever” and me making the decision at the start of the war if I want it to go two or three days.

Part of that is unwillingness to do some of the extra fiddly stuff like use the angel and goth kid to their full extent. I also don’t want to deal with Jack-in-the-box zone switching, because while it saves turns, it takes way more time than I’m willing to spend. I haven’t really sat down and thought about pulls so far either. My current runs have been kinda tight, but I’ve been pulling a lot of fluff. Also, my whatever runs indicate that I should spending a lot of time with a leprechaun, and a lot of time with a fairy, and that not many other familiars are super important (aside from the angel and goth kid, of course). Hound dog is perfectly fine, but so are the 1x familiars (slimeling, fairy-lep, etc). Scarecrow is okay too, but considering there are so many chances to run a fairy for extra fam xp, it’s actually kind of unnecessary. I’d like to try the mutant ant when the moons are right.

I’ve been ending up with extra copies on my runs, so there is probably some room for improvement there too. Because most of the zones are available from the start, it’s considerably easier to manage olfaction and easier to forget about copying.

So far, I’ve reached the conclusion that Big isn’t the death of no-path. Here’s how I figure it.
For starters, there are only really 3 groups of players.

Group 1: is primarily the players who have all of the skills and are playing the game for prestige. They want the commendations, the fame or the pride of having “fast” runs. Or are the people who are trying to do fast runs. I feel this group is pretty small, perhaps 100 active players.Group 2: Contains all of the players who are doing challenge paths and runs for skill points. Some of this group is in the first group as well.Group 3: Are the casuals. They don’t care about how many valhalla skill points they get for doing a run, and do whatever they feel is fun even if that is run after run of 100% BM black cat, or a pointless (ha ha, get it?) casual run.

The important thing to note is that group 2 is a transient group. There is a limit to how much valhalla karma you can get before you get all the skills (and run out of things to perm). At that point you either have to decide that you enjoy playing the game for what it is (and no longer care about the the numbers next to the paths in valhalla) or you enjoy vying for fame (and no longer care about the numbers next to the paths in valhalla).
So there is only one group that benefits from easier to get karma, and that is the low skill, transient 2nd group.

I think it’s perfectly fine that newer players can accumulate skills faster either by playing Big or whatever the new path is. I personally don’t find the skill grind to be fun, because as group 1 and 3 will point out, getting skills isn’t the game.

Another thing I was thinking of: killing tower monsters without the juju mask. Tower monsters have 100,000 HP, and if you consider that round 1 is throwing blue-balls and finger cuffs, you really only have 29 rounds to kill the beast. I’m assuming that you have Dalmatian running, and that you have GAP Skill active too. Using a green lantern doubles the output of each blast of a hobo spell as well as the attack from Dalmatian. Furthermore, since rounds 2 and 3 combine to make an attack with 3 blasts, lets assume for simplicity that you actually have 28 rounds with 4 attacks each. How much +%spell damage is needed?
Each blast only needs to do 892 damage, or 447 before the lantern.
At buffed myst of 600, we’re doing 250 damage base, so we only need +80% spell damage. pool buff gives +50%, cheese staff is +50%. Wizard shack offers +150%, and the 37x puzzle cube offers +25%. Clip art offers a food and a booze 1 fullness item that increases damage by 100%. Assuming that I didn’t pull the cheese staff, I would only need +8 spell damage to compensate. I usually end up with lots of feistier resolutions(+20), the black market offers +10 damage (and +10% myst), there is flavour (+10) , jackass (+12) and in a pinch I could make a papaya potion (+10).
It looks like the minimum set of things I need to tower kill are: GAP, Dalmatian, VIP, scarecrow, hobo spell, rain-doh and I guess Inigos for the myst boost. Probably a single game grid token for safety, although it should doable otherwise. And it might only be viable for a myst class, because of need for a high myst stat. Actually, every 3 myst stat points is equivalent to ~+1 spell damage.

If you were going the juju mask route, you’d still be pulling rain-doh and GAP, and would also be using the scarecrow. The trade off would be casting inigos and dalmatian instead of pulling the mask. I don’t think the mana is really an issue since you could do the nuns as a frat at use that to supply the ~2k mana you need to towerkill.

edit: I tried towerkilling at the end of my sauceror run, and it worked great. I underestimated my numbers by a long shot though. Firstly, I was able to get about 750 in my myst stat. I was also able to get ~+100 spell damage as well as a bonus 180%. So each of my base hits was about 1k damage, and I was finishing the fight in about 15 rounds. That was actually much quicker than the juju method, and somewhat more reliable since the trickster gaze floors at 1/8 chance per round.

It turned out that if I didn’t bother with fancy map_to_files and java arrays, I could do it quite simply. Right now, the script is about 30 lines of code and 50 lines of comments. It does this:
0) debug option
0.5) if debug is turned on, it’ll print out the name of your location
1) it checks your current location to your previous location. if you changed zones, it’ll go to the next step, otherwise it’ll end
2) the location value is used to determine which plants you want in the zone. visiting a location on the list results in a call to the planting function.
3) planting is super simple. each plant has a unique value, so it’s as simple as giving the right URL to KOL.
4) after planting, the location is saved for comparison next turn.

Because each plant has a unique number, but because humans are terrible at understanding that the number 4 in this particular context really means “use a plant that delevels at the start of combat for Outdoor zones”, I have 45 lines of comments (one for each plant, 4 more for each zone type, and a few spaces for style). As a result, it’s not very simple for someone to set up. Also, there is no error checking and no checking that you’re requesting the correct plant to be planted in the right environment.

I think it’d be neat if there was a way to look at the current plants in each zone though the watering schedule and generate an ash script based on that. But I cant figure out how to write to a file in mafia that isn’t a text file. It’ll either automatically add “.txt” or start formatting the file weird. Also, it’d be weird to have your aftercore farming zones queued up next to your ascending zones. So because it’s hard to set up, and because it’s probably not going to be useful to many people, I probably won’t be sharing it. Which is too bad, because it’s really neat. I just don’t want to do tech support or deal with user issues.

Edit: and of course, because there is no error checking, I get my zones mixed up and it doesn’t work sometimes. Maybe I can write a script to check the zones on the wiki so I don’t have to figure it out while I’m ascending? Maybe even correct it and output it in red? to signal that it needs fixed?

I finished the clothing of loathing outfit today; I got the outfit after 6 weeks of ascending (april 20th to may 31st, a cool 40 days). I want to swing back and pick up the other two incidental outfits. The fuzzy slippers are quite nice, and so are the ass-stompers and chefstaff.

The final boss wasn’t that difficult. It wasn’t even difficult compared to the other two bosses since you were so limited in what you could do. For starters, you had to wear a specific outfit, so there was very little in the way of variation. buffs were stripped, combat items were disabled, and there isn’t much else to do besides cast hobo spells. The fight wasn’t really that interesting.

There is the issue of the star spawn buddy. apparently, after 300 combats the dude gives you 1000 in each stat, multiplied by whatever percentage bonuses you have running (moons, shower, etc). So at base, it works out to an equivalent 44 lb volley that gives you mana and attacks during combats. However, the issue is that those stats are way delayed. Turn 300 on a normal 500ish turn run is around level 10, so you have to do more early powerleveling, which is ineffective because powerleveling scales to your stats (most of the time, not cave bars). It’d be really sweet for something like bad moon, but then again, a normal cocobo is great for bad moon too.
So I’m struggling to see myself using it for anything but a 100% run. And that’s fine, really. I have enough familiars to juggle and don’t want to add another one. It’d be nice if it had some use though, as in “oh, this would be great for aftercore”, “this would be really nice for fighting really tough monsters” or something. I guess it would be okay for paths where you need stats and mana, but don’t need items? or if you’re a newer player without nice items and don’t care about going fast?

In other news, Big runs are going very well. I’m having a difficult time finding worthwhile stuff to pull, so last run I think I just pulled Cheese, juju mask and a RoC (plus rain-doh). Made a demon-skin jacket to tune sauce spells and ran jackass +spheres the entire time to get splashbacks. It was pretty cool.
This run, a disco bandit, I gave up on kung-fu and pulled the Space Tourist Phaser and space trip headphones. One nice thing about Big is that since stats don’t matter, it doesn’t matter if I choose a moonsign that corresponds to my mainstat.Update-to-add: DB finished personal fastest 2/526, I don’t understand since I didn’t try very hard. I ran polka and a fairy-lep for 70% of the run, and finished with 70k meat. I was planning on a 3 day, but I got to the war and realized that I was going to be ~30 turns away from the end so I used borrowed time and drank a generator (instead of some crappier booze). I’d really like to beat 2/500 (even if I don’t get a commendation) this season, so I need to start thinking about how to best order the zones, figuring out pulls and … stuff.

I have 2 more parts of the Hatred outfit to pick up, and then I can finally get the pocket square. My only runs left are Pastamancer and Accordion Thief.

The belt of loathing looks pretty good. The belt gives +10 familiar weight in an accessory slot, which was previously populated by junk that gave +2 or +3 fam weight, so it’s relatively interesting jump in power.

I’ve already started the pastamancer run. With any luck I’ll make it to day 3 without eating much and be able to do the sea on the same day as breaking the prism. My last two runs were 2 day runs, so I’d like to take this one a little slower. I like that in Big you don’t need to powerlevel, but getting all the quests at once is a little overwhelming. I know that I should be setting the ballroom song quickly, but I also need to open the knob so I can get the kitchen SR. I also need to group all of my -combat stuff together for when I get the swimming pool buff, and sometimes stuff isn’t unlocked.

I need to plan out a run that I can be happy about. Ideally, it wouldn’t involve pulling anything more expensive than a few wrecked generators, some pies and maybe a mojo filter, but idk. I have a lot of options open up when I’m not compelled to use a volley type or even pick the corresponding stat zodiac sign. For example, it would be perfectly okay to run the hobo monkey in place of the volley so I can maybe save a turn or two at the nuns. I can also do weird stuff like put the hound in crown of thrones for slightly extra familiar exp.
I’d really love to get my time down to ~2/500. Borrowed time, plus 2 rollovers is 100, so I just need to generate 400 turns between AEDS (99), KLPs (114), maybe some quiche (13) and fortune cookies (6). 168 need to be generated from booze, or ~140 over both days if you exclude the nightcap (works out neatly to 4 wrecked generators), and leaves a little wiggle room for the blessed box drunkeness and some extra turns from filler (probably 20ish).

In my last two runs I’ve been using pickle juice and instant karma to squeeze out extra turns (four times the price, 1.5x the turns). Also, my 2nd Big run was faster than my fastest SCNP run. I’m not really surprised.

Should a challenge path be faster than the base game? Does it really matter? Personally, I feel that jick took out the two parts of the game that no one likes (level requirements and stats) and free runaways (which are sort of overpowered) to make the game more enjoyable. It does feel like less of a game though, which is weird. My gut is saying this is a bad thing, but I can’t figure out why – no one has been seriously doing no-path for years.